onstage VS FOH...Whats the point?

[aborgman]

Originally Posted by KJung

+1 The post you were responding to made me cringe. IMO, the number one reason for crappy bass tone out in the room in a large venue with big front of house is soundpersons depending on subwoofers to overdo both the bass drum and to crank so much sub bass into a bassist's tone that all you can do is feel it. Totally messes up the mix.

I wish these sound people (at least some of them who have this issue... there are obviously some great ones out there) would actually listen to well engineered recordings. THAT is the tone I try to achieve, and on most pop/pop country/funk/light rock/jazz recordings (which is the context in which I typically perform), the bass slots into the track above the bass drum, and there is VERY little sub bass (i.e., below the typical 60hz or so that a decent cab rolls off) in the mix.

Makes me want to cry when I read a post like that.

Exactly.

[wcriley]

KJung, I couldn't agree more.
It seems that too many sound sytem operators have become so enamoured with their subs that they've forgotten that their job is to make things sound NATURAL.

[will33]

Originally Posted by Sartori

It's not every bassist's sonic goal to project a ton of deep sub frequencies. That's kick drum territory, for me.

Exactly.

It's the inexperienced soundman not worth his pay that somehow manages to turn thump and definition into woof and click.

I'm with those who say sound reproduction is just that...RE-production. A PA should never create the sound, only capture what's already there and make it louder, adjusting for the room as necessary. If the sound coming from FOH is something vastly different than what's on stage, something has gone horribly wrong.

There are sound engineers out there who are masters at doing it right.

[dukeorock]

Just as gear and players are all over the map, so are FOH people...I'll bring a rig I know will work without FOH and if they know what they're doing...I'll turn down

[georgestrings]

Originally Posted by KJung

3) Related to 2, most bassists actually play better when they hear what they need/want to hear tonally, even if that tone is not exactly reproduced by the front of house.

This - when the day comes that I can't hear and enjoy what I'm playing, I'll quit... According to some of the "experts" here(and in live sound), having the bass at volumes matching drums and guitars makes a good live mix impossible at the FOH... I almost never "carry the room" with my rig, but I'll be damned if I'll play at such a low volume(and crappy tone) that I hate what I'm doing - just so that some "soundman" can push what *he* thinks my bass *should* sound like thru a PA that doesn't even belong to him...

When I see the soundman's name on the marquee instead of my band's name, I'll reconsider my position - 'til then, no dice...


- georgestrings

[Downunderwonder]

I hear Kjung on the over the top sub bass. Really good bass cabs can do enough sub lows to hold even mid sized rooms together, when well placed. If you're doing that here you won't be in the FOH, all power to ya! These premium cabs are not what my locals are using, nor many of TB. Often there isn't much choice where to put the bass rig anyway.

The problem for us regular Joes is we want to feel like we're on George's big stage when we're only playing a club for 150. Once a week, if we're lucky, a good gig for me is 100.

This is the level I am working at. I also help with sound for enthusiast bands. They all want to plug into the house PA and let rip like they hit the bigtime, who doesn't?! The biggest venue can stuff in around 200 but I've never seen it that full.

Originally Posted by Bassmec

If you have a big venue and a big PA and monitors you have a lot more
disparate sound sources than I bass amp one PA stack and one floor monitor to deal with, how would you deal with the difference in time and phase of the floor monitor that provides the fold back if there is no bass rig at all, especially if its a great deal closer to one PA stack than the other.
Same set of problems exist with or without an onstage bass rig unless he just gets in ear monitors and the PA is mono single point source and there is no reflective wall you could hear.
It's better to at least attempt to get as much intelligibility to as many people in the audience as as possible and the bass player perfectly
rather than to ruin the experience for the bass player.
If you stand to one side of the hall even with no bass rig and no monitors or side fills, the left side of the PA and subs is still out of phase with the right.
So you can't win absolutely but doing nothing more than flipping the phase switch on the console channel strip, is not the level I have been working at.

You're selling big venue snake oiled straw men.

Most of us here aren't playing big venues. Almost none of us are going direct or want to. Bet your life the audience would get the best fidelity ever but I'm not advocating everyone ditches their rig every time there's a PA.

Using different cabs in the PA from the bass rig they are misphased up the wazoo no matter what. On this scale using my own PA I could delay the FOH additional bass to phase back to at least be somewhat coherent at the bassist. You can bang on all you like about all the other misphased junk bouncing around the room but making the FOH the dominant source of bass sound out front is the key to making the best of it.

Say instead I align my support for the loud misphased bass to the average punter, it would suck worse for the guy standing ten feet to his right.

Using the house PA's, delay is not even available if I wanted it! The house sub is either 6ft or 12ft from the bass rig. These are the kind of realities which prompted the thread.

Giant bass rig works if you leave the bass out of the FOH in these simple PA's, sticking you with the dispersion of the rig. In the case of all the 8x10 and 6x10 and 4x10 that's lousy. In addition your guitars will always want to follow suit with the loudness, sticking the audience with chainsaw highs to the 1/4 of the audience in front of the 4x12. Monitors are rendered "a joke" when they would be adequate with a quieter stage.

Some of the bands I help out take my advice on board and their sound improves greatly. Others do not. The worst offenders I strike are the best band if you ignore the sound. I wonder where they might be if they dialed it in.

Why am I bothering to post all this? Live music is struggling to hold ground in the entertainment business. We all have to pull our heads in and make the best possible sounds for the audiences. I like my 2x15 at my back as much as the next guy but it's rare I get to crank it.

It annoys me no end when full time pro guys with pro rigs assume us weekend warrior types have access to the same topnotch soundmen and gear as them. For crying out loud, half of the real world is in a running week in week out battle to keep our guitarists and drummers from blowing us off the stage. Even me sometimes. To rub it in they try to tell me I don't know what I'm doing.

[will33]

I think KJung pretty much nailed what a lot of us are trying to say.

It's like a teenager with a fast car or something....the "I have all these subs, I'm going to use every ounce of them, every time". I don't understand how somebody could sit there and listen to that without instinctively reaching for some knobs to fix it, rather than thinking " heh...that's cool".

[Downunderwonder]

To sum up my situation, which I believe is same for many of us:

I can use either my big rig OR a tiddler in the venues I play. Either can work but if I want to take advantage of the house PA I have to do it quietly. There is no way to have the cake and eat it.

[Warmuth]

My band runs everything through the board and to our p.a. Technically my rig is useless for the bands sound as I could just run ampless. However, I use it as a monitor and I like to hear my personal tone even if it's not exactly what the audience is hearing. If I don't like whats coming from my cab it's irritating. If I think I sound rad then all the better for the show.

Plus, a big rig looks awesome and rock and roll must be kept alive

[will33]

Originally Posted by Downunderwonder

To sum up my situation, which I believe is same for many of us:

I can use either my big rig OR a tiddler in the venues I play. Either can work but if I want to take advantage of the house PA I have to do it quietly. There is no way to have the cake and eat it.

Good point here as well.

I'm in the mostly 200 audience or less crowd, carry my own PA and mix from stage. I can either blast my rig (which is great fun), or bring it down and mic it. Yes...mic it. My default sound, all of the bands default sounds already blend nicely, no need to do anything other than take that and make it louder. Time delay...phase adjustment...what's that? You do that with speaker placement as best you can and try not to have the same sound coming from multiple areas....we don't have a knob for that.


I've also played plenty of festival shows, etc. In a deal like that, it doesn't matter what the hell anybody does to their bass rig. Piles of horn subs and line arrays will bulldoze and steamroll anybody's so called "big rig".


What I don't get is this closeminded, blinder wearing thought that any decent sound must be achieved by way of rigless setups, preamps, in-ear buds and some goofball behind the board taking any and all artistic freedom/tone shaping away from everybody with the thought that "their ears know what I should sound like".

Plenty of us can sound plenty great, just by taking what we're already doing and putting it out there for folks to hear.

[Honkycat]

I always bring 2 x 210's with me ...anymore than that(svt-fridge?) and the soundguy will be generally on your case before you've even played a note....In my formative years,I was'nt fussy about amps per se...but nowadays I do like to be inspired by a good onstage bass sound.Hearing bass through monitor wedges is a bit depressing.
I generally get along with most FOH guys....although I have noticed a lot of them have a complete distrust of your amps DI.Then they will hand you some beat up old passive DI.

[JimmyM]

Originally Posted by will33

Good point here as well.

I'm in the mostly 200 audience or less crowd, carry my own PA and mix from stage. I can either blast my rig (which is great fun), or bring it down and mic it. Yes...mic it. My default sound, all of the bands default sounds already blend nicely, no need to do anything other than take that and make it louder. Time delay...phase adjustment...what's that? You do that with speaker placement as best you can and try not to have the same sound coming from multiple areas....we don't have a knob for that.


I've also played plenty of festival shows, etc. In a deal like that, it doesn't matter what the hell anybody does to their bass rig. Piles of horn subs and line arrays will bulldoze and steamroll anybody's so called "big rig".


What I don't get is this closeminded, blinder wearing thought that any decent sound must be achieved by way of rigless setups, preamps, in-ear buds and some goofball behind the board taking any and all artistic freedom/tone shaping away from everybody with the thought that "their ears know what I should sound like".

Plenty of us can sound plenty great, just by taking what we're already doing and putting it out there for folks to hear.

Word. I used to mic and I loved it and never had a problem getting a good sound, although I do like using the REDDI better now. Did some large theater gigs last week with another band on the bill, and unlike me who was working with a guy who doesn't want to hear bass, their bassist was encouraged to turn way up with a big rig, and the soundmen on these gigs ended up pulling him out of the PA and it sounded quite good, I thought.

[Jim Carr]

Originally Posted by derrico1

Full stack? no. (A *lot* of stage volume will interfere w/ a capable FOH system, not help it.)

Some sort of stage rig? Depends: how reliable is this sound guy you're relying on?

+1

Two perfect questions, and one perfect answer. The missing perfect answer is the phrase, "Unanswerable, but have a detailed concert rider, and a well-known lawyer."

[Jim Carr]

Originally Posted by KJung

...IMO, the number one reason for crappy bass tone out in the room in a large venue with big front of house is soundpersons depending on subwoofers to overdo both the bass drum and to crank so much sub bass into a bassist's tone that all you can do is feel it. Totally messes up the mix.

I wish these sound people...would actually listen to well engineered recordings. THAT is the tone I try to achieve...the bass slots into the track above the bass drum, and there is VERY little sub bass (i.e., below the typical 60hz or so that a decent cab rolls off) in the mix...

+1

Oh so true, and I like lows.

[Russell L]

Almost every band I've heard live lately has too much bass drum, and then the bass is too deep with no definition, but just rolls around. I'm sick of that sound.

[Bassmec]

Originally Posted by Russell L

Almost every band I've heard live lately has too much bass drum, and then the bass is too deep with no definition, but just rolls around. I'm sick of that sound.

Yup it's all just a load of wobble and hardly any solidity or punch.
I hate it.

[georgestrings]

Originally Posted by will33

Good point here as well.

I'm in the mostly 200 audience or less crowd, carry my own PA and mix from stage. I can either blast my rig (which is great fun), or bring it down and mic it. Yes...mic it. My default sound, all of the bands default sounds already blend nicely, no need to do anything other than take that and make it louder. Time delay...phase adjustment...what's that? You do that with speaker placement as best you can and try not to have the same sound coming from multiple areas....we don't have a knob for that.


I've also played plenty of festival shows, etc. In a deal like that, it doesn't matter what the hell anybody does to their bass rig. Piles of horn subs and line arrays will bulldoze and steamroll anybody's so called "big rig".


What I don't get is this closeminded, blinder wearing thought that any decent sound must be achieved by way of rigless setups, preamps, in-ear buds and some goofball behind the board taking any and all artistic freedom/tone shaping away from everybody with the thought that "their ears know what I should sound like".

Plenty of us can sound plenty great, just by taking what we're already doing and putting it out there for folks to hear.

Agreed on all of the above... Down did bring up a good point on venue and crowd size - I usually gig clubs that'll hold 300-500, and do outdoor stuff for the most part, which is definitely different than playing a 100-150 cap bar...

Recently, my band was offered some nice pay and perks to play a private halloween party - so we took it... When we brought our stuff in, it was obvious the place could only hold around 100 people - but had a full PA, also... We used our normal backline - but I told the soundguy we probably wouldn't need the backline going thru the FOH... We still mic'd the guitar cabs and DI'd my bass rig so that the drummer had his monitor mix - but mostly just ran vocals and kick thru the PA... We used wedges for vocal monitors, and just played a hair under our normal volume - and it worked out quite well... The soundguy was able to balance the vocals thru the FOH and wedges with our backline - which we usually self regulate quite well... For us, it was like a really fun, well paid rehearsal that must've worked out well, since the guy paying us offered an extra $100 that night, and twice the halloween pay to play NYE...


- georgestrings

[will33]

Originally Posted by georgestrings

Agreed on all of the above... Down did bring up a good point on venue and crowd size - I usually gig clubs that'll hold 300-500, and do outdoor stuff for the most part, which is definitely different than playing a 100-150 cap bar...

Recently, my band was offered some nice pay and perks to play a private halloween party - so we took it... When we brought our stuff in, it was obvious the place could only hold around 100 people - but had a full PA, also... We used our normal backline - but I told the soundguy we probably wouldn't need the backline going thru the FOH... We still mic'd the guitar cabs and DI'd my bass rig so that the drummer had his monitor mix - but mostly just ran vocals and kick thru the PA... We used wedges for vocal monitors, and just played a hair under our normal volume - and it worked out quite well... The soundguy was able to balance the vocals thru the FOH and wedges with our backline - which we usually self regulate quite well... For us, it was like a really fun, well paid rehearsal that must've worked out well, since the guy paying us offered an extra $100 that night, and twice the halloween pay to play NYE...


- georgestrings

A lot of our gigs are like this, sort of right inbetween where some my rig can carry and some it needs help. Our band sound already blends nicely. I don't have a bunch of woof masking the kick drum, the guitarist doesn't have a bunch of lows fighting mine, etc., so most of my PA eqing is to adjust for whether the room is live or dead, etc. and not to change anybodys tone much, it's already good. Just take what we're doing and make it loud enough to suit the venue, that's about it. I do have to beef up the guitarists soft-spoken voice some, but we've been doing this enough that's automatic as well. I can set his channel strip correctly before even turning the system on.

[nysbob]

There are a number of FOH guys who seem to have been overly influenced by trends displayed in car stereo competitions. Stupid amounts non musical of low stuff....

[godofthunder59]

This sums up my feelings perfectly.

Originally Posted by georgestrings

This - when the day comes that I can't hear and enjoy what I'm playing, I'll quit... According to some of the "experts" here(and in live sound), having the bass at volumes matching drums and guitars makes a good live mix impossible at the FOH... I almost never "carry the room" with my rig, but I'll be damned if I'll play at such a low volume(and crappy tone) that I hate what I'm doing - just so that some "soundman" can push what *he* thinks my bass *should* sound like thru a PA that doesn't even belong to him...

When I see the soundman's name on the marquee instead of my band's name, I'll reconsider my position - 'til then, no dice...


- georgestrings